by C. P. Snow
For a moment, Martin was lost, and then he gave a recognising smile. It had been a phrase of hers which obliterated all threats, laughed off the prospect of war (I could hear her using it in July 1914, when I was eight years old), and incidentally promised the triumph of all her favourite causes, such as worldwide teetotalism. She had used it indomitably till she died.
After all, it was the twentieth century. We had heard others, who had found their hopes blighted and who had reneged on them, call it (as Austin Davidson did, and most of his friends) this dreadful century. Neither Martin nor I was going to know what our children would call it, when they were the age we had reached now.
Martin lit a cigar. The smell was strong in the still air. After a time he said: “There was a lot of talk about freedom.”
“You mean, among the lawyers? Tonight?”
“Not only there.”
Not able to stop himself, he had returned to the two women. Ultimate freedom. The limitless talks. More than most people, certainly more than any of the lawyers or spectators at the trial, Martin and I could recreate those talks. For we had heard them, taken part in them. “What is to tie me down, except myself? It is for me to will what I shall accept. Why should I obey conventions which I didn’t make?” It was true that, when we had heard them, those declarations were full of hope. George’s great cries had nothing Nietzschean about them. They were innocent when they proclaimed that there was a fundamental “I” which could do anything in its freedom. When you started there, though, Martin said, in an even, sensible tone, you could go further. Wasn’t that what the man Cornford was getting at with his “escalation”?
“Do you believe,” asked Martin, “that – if it hadn’t been for all the hothouse air we used to know about – those two mightn’t have it?”
He spoke without emotion, rationally. The question was pointed for us both. We were gazing out to the moonlit lawn, like passengers on the boat deck gazing out to sea. Without looking at him, I spoke, just as carefully. It was impossible to prove. Was there ever any single cause of any action, particularly of actions such as this? Yes, they must have been affected by the atmosphere round them, yes, they were more likely to go to the extreme in their sexual tastes. Perhaps it made it easier for them to share their fantasies. But between those fantasies, and what they had done, there was still the unimaginable gap. Of course there were influences in the air. But only people like them, predisposed to commit sadistic horrors anyway, would have been played on to the lethal end. If they had not had these influences, there would have been others.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said. “But I think that wherever they’d been, they’d have done something horrible.”
“Are you letting everyone off?” he said.
“I was telling you, I don’t know the answer, and nor does anyone else.”
“I grant you that,” said Martin.
We were not arguing, our voices were very quiet. He said – in a quite different society, more rigid, more controlled, was there a chance that they would never have killed? He answered his own question. Maybe there might be less of these sexual crimes. Perhaps such a society could reduce the likelihood. “But, if you’re right,” he said, “no one could answer for those two.”
He had turned to me, speaking quite gently. He thought that I might be making excuses for us all: yet they were excuses he wanted to accept. He also knew that I was as uncertain as he was.
All of a sudden, his cigar tip glowing in the shadow, he gave a curious smile. In an instant, when he spoke again, I realised that he had been thinking of a different society. “I have seen the future. And it works.” That had been Steffens’ phrase, nearly fifty years before. When Martin repeated it, there was in his tone the experience of all that had happened since. He went on, in the same tone, not harsh, not even cynical: “I have seen freedom. And it rots.”
In some moods, he might have said it with intention. But not that night; it was one thought out of many, often contradicting each other, that he couldn’t keep out of his own mind and could suspect in mine. In fact, he took the edge off his last words almost at once. Anyway, he was saying, unabrasively, as though he too had had his memory shortened, as though he were just content with the calm night, there was something in what Ted Benskin had said, wasn’t there? Authority might have disappeared, there wasn’t much order about, but our children, like Ted’s, seemed happy. Not that there had been much paternal authority in our family; Martin was smiling about our father. “Whereas,” he said, “young Charles has to put up with you.”
Martin knew Charles very well, in his independence, his secret ambitions, and his pride. They were unusually intimate for uncle and nephew. In some aspects, their temperaments were more like each other than either was like mine.
Martin leaned back, giving out an air of bodily comfort: we seemed to have regressed to a peaceful family night.
“By the by,” he said, “I meant to have a word with you about my boy” – (he never liked calling Pat by his name of protest).
This wasn’t altogether casual, I knew as I said yes. He had been holding it back all week.
“You told me once, it must have been getting on for a year ago, about that nice girl. Vicky,” Martin went on.
“What about her?”
“I think someone ought to make her realise that it’s all off.”
“Are you sure?”
“I shouldn’t be saying this,” said Martin, “unless I really was sure.”
“It’s for him to do it,” I said, both angry and sad. I wanted to say (the old phrase came back, for which we hadn’t found a modern version) that it would break her heart.
“He’s genuinely tried, I really am sure of that too. I don’t often defend him, you know that.” Martin, who did not as a rule deceive himself, spoke as though he believed that was the truth. “But he has genuinely tried. She’s been hanging on long after there’s been nothing there. It’s the old story, how tenacious women can be, once they’re in love.”
“It’s absolutely over for him? He won’t go back and play her up again?”
“I guarantee he won’t.”
“He’s not above leaving a thread he likes to twitch. When he’s got nothing better to do.”
“Not this time,” said Martin.
“Why are you so sure?”
“I’m afraid that he’s made up his mind. Or someone else has made up his mind for him.”
Martin was speaking with kindness of Vicky, more than kindness, the sympathy of one who was fond of women and who might have felt his eyes brighten at the sight of this one. But he was also speaking with obscure satisfaction, as though he had news which he couldn’t yet share but which, when he forgot everything else, gave him well-being, and, as he sat there beside me in the garden, something like animal content.
32: Quality of a Leader
BACK in court the following morning, we were listening to more psychiatrists, as though this were the normal run of our existence and the family conversation in a garden as unmemorable as a dream. These were the psychiatrists called by the prosecution, and we knew in advance that there would be only two. That was planned as the total evidence in rebuttal, and they were as careful and moderate as the defence doctors, without even the occasional wave of Adam Cornford’s panache. In the result, though, through the moderate words, they were each saying an absolute no.
Obviously by prearrangement – as I whispered to Martin, sitting at my side in the box – neither Benskin nor Wilson pressed the prison psychiatrist far. Bosanquet had questioned him about his knowledge of the prisoners: yes, he had had them under observation since they were first arrested. He was a man near to retiring age, who had spent his whole career in the prison service: he had seen more criminals, psychotics, psychopaths, than anyone who had come into court, and yet he still spoke with an air of gentle surprise. Miss Ross and Miss Pateman had shown no detectable signs of mental disorder. Some slight abnormality, perhaps, nothing more. Medically, their
encephalograms were normal. He had conducted prolonged interviews with Miss Pateman: Miss Ross had, under examination, not usually been willing to discuss her own history. So far as he could judge, they were intelligent. Miss Pateman had asked for supplies of books from the prison library. Their behaviour was not much different, or not different at all, from other prisoners held on serious charges. Miss Pateman exhibited certain anxiety symptoms, including chronic sleeplessness, and her health had caused some concern. Miss Ross had a tic of obsessive hand washing, but this she admitted was not new or caused by her being in prison. Neither had at any time been willing to speak of the killing. Occasionally Miss Ross went in for something like talking to herself, monologues about what appeared to be imaginary scenes, in which she and Miss Pateman figured alone.
“None of this has made you consider that they are not responsible for their actions?”
“No.”
“From all your observations, you would not consider that they acted in a state of diminished responsibility?”
“No. I’m afraid I can’t give them that.”
“After your long experience, you are positive in your opinion?”
“I am.”
It was while Benskin, in his first questions, was asking the doctor to say what he meant by a “slight abnormality of mind”, that Martin, plucking my sleeve, pointed to the body of the court. Since the morning before, when the medical evidence had begun, the attendance had fallen off, as in a London theatre on a Monday night: the gallery was almost empty that morning, and the lower ranges only half-full: but there (he had not been present at the beginning of the session, he must have entered during the Crown examination) sat George. His great head stood out leonine; he was staring at the witness box with glaucous eyes.
I scribbled on the top of a deposition sheet We shall have to sit with him this afternoon. As Martin read that, he nodded, his brow furrowed, all the previous night’s relaxation gone.
Benskin was asking, weren’t those opinions subjective, wasn’t it difficult or impossible even for an expert to be absolutely certain about some mental conditions? Could anyone in the world be certain about some mental conditions? Weren’t there features of the doctor’s observations, given in his examination-in-chief, which might be regarded as pointers to deep abnormality–? Just for an instant, Benskin (who often suffered from the reverse of l’esprit de l’escalier, who thought of the bright remark, made it, and then wished he hadn’t) was tempted away from his own strategy. He began to ask when “our expert” had last been in touch with professional trends? Had he read–? Benskin shook himself. The jury wouldn’t like it, this was an elderly modest man, the sooner he was out of the box the better. The tactic was to reserve the attack for the heavyweight witness. Disciplining himself, anxious at having to waive a marginal chance, Wilson kept to the same line. He asked a few questions about Miss Pateman’s state of health, her record of psychosomatic illness, and then let the doctor go.
The heavyweight witness was a Home Office consultant, brought in as a counterpoise to Adam Cornford. When Bosanquet asked “Is your name Matthew Gough?”, that meant nothing to almost everyone in court, and yet, before he answered the question at all, during the instant while he was clambering up to the box, he had been recognised, as no one else had been recognised in the whole trial. The fact was, he appeared often on television, under the anonymous label of psychiatrist, giving his views – articulately, but with as little fuss as Cornford in court – on crime, delinquency, abortion, homosexuality, drugs, race relations, censorship and the phenomena relating to Unidentified Flying Objects. On the television screen he gave the impression of very strong masculinity. In the witness box this impression became more prepotent still. He was dark-haired, vulture-faced, with a nose that dominated his chin. Despite his peculiar kind of anonymous fame, which brought him some envy, his professional reputation was high. He wasn’t such an academic flyer as Adam Cornford, but his practice – in a country which didn’t support many private psychiatrists – was at least as large. He was said to have had a powerful and humane influence upon the Home Office criminologists. I had heard also that he was – this came as a surprise in his profession – a deeply religious man.
In the box, his manner was kind, not assertive, but with a flow of feeling underneath. He had, he answered, spent a good many hours with each of the two women. He had found Miss Ross – in this he was odd-man-out from the other doctors – as communicative as Miss Pateman, sometimes more completely so. It was true that occasionally she put up total “resistance”: but his judgment was that this was deliberate, and could be broken when she wanted. Not that he blamed her, that was one of her protective shields, such as we all had. To the puzzlement of many, he differed flatly from the others in his attitude to Cora Ross; he seemed to find her more interesting, or at least more explicable, than Kitty. Miss Ross’ father had left her mother when she was an infant; not much was known about him, Miss Ross’ memory of him was minimal and her mother was dead: there was some suggestion that he had been (and possibly still was, for no one knew whether he was alive) mentally unstable. He had been an obsessive gambler, but that might have been the least of it. Miss Ross had been left alone in her childhood more than most of us: it had been an unusually lonely bringing up. Perhaps that had conduced both to her immaturity (about which he agreed with Cornford) and to the sadistic fantasies, which she had certainly been possessed by since an early age: but that was common to many of us, so common that the absence was probably more “abnormal” than the presence.
Without emphasis Bosanquet led Matthew Gough over the descriptions Cornford had given. It was a good examination, designed to show that Gough was as unprejudiced as the other men. Yes, Miss Ross had lived on the fringe of a free-living group. If she had been less timid or inhibited, that might have “liberated” her. Actually it had driven her further into herself. It was hurtful to live in a Venusberg without taking part oneself.
As for her relation with Kitty, he had some doubts about Cornford’s analysis. He wouldn’t dismiss it altogether: but “guilt” used in that fashion was a technical term. He wasn’t easy about this concept of the escalation of guilt. Many homosexual or perverse relations were quite free of it. “Bad sex”, in Cornford’s sense, was very common: it did not often lead to minor violence, let alone to sadistic killing; it was very dangerous, and unjustified, to try to define a simple causation.
Bosanquet: You would not accept then, Dr Gough, that this relation in any way diminished their responsibility?
Gough: No.
Bosanquet: Or that any other feature of their personal history did so?
Gough: No.
On Kitty Pateman, he said one puzzling thing (which I half-missed, since just at that time the judge’s clerk entered our box, giving me his lordship’s compliments, and asking if I would care to lunch with him on the coming Monday). He was speaking about her environment: while Cora had grown up solitary, Kitty had lived her whole childhood and youth in a close family life – as intense, I was thinking, as the fug in that stifling sitting-room. That was a good environment, said Gough. Stable, settled, affectionate. This must have been his own interpretation of Kitty’s account – or had she misled him? Gough was disposed to believe devotedly in family life, I was thinking. It was then that he surprised me. But even in a stable family, he said, there could be wounds – which only the person wounded might know. Was he being massively fair-minded, or had he picked up a clue?
In the specific case of Miss Pateman, it seemed that she might have had an excessive attachment to her father. But he, Gough, could not regard that as a cause of her later actions. That was over-simplifying. Her relation with Miss Ross, her part in the crime – no one could identify the origins.
Bosanquet: You discussed the crime with her, doctor?
Gough: With each of them. On several occasions.
Bosanquet: Were they willing to describe it?
Gough: Up to a point.
Bosanquet: Will you e
laborate that, please?
Gough: They were prepared to describe in detail, almost hour by hour, how they planned to kidnap the boy. They told me about what happened at the cottage and how they brutalised him. But they wouldn’t go beyond the Sunday afternoon. Miss Pateman said they had finished punishing him by then. Neither of them at any time gave any account of how they killed him.
Bosanquet: Were they at this stage still pretending that they hadn’t done so?
Gough: I think not.
Bosanquet: Why wouldn’t they speak of what they did to him after the Sunday afternoon, then?
Gough: They each said, several times, that they had forgotten.
Bosanquet: That is, they were concealing it?
Gough: Again I think not. I believe it was genuine amnesia.
Bosanquet: You really mean, they had forgotten killing that child?
Gough: It is quite common for someone to forget the act of killing.
In his last question Bosanquet had, quite untypically, inflected his voice. For once he was at a loss. We realised that he was getting an answer he didn’t expect, and one that the defence might return to (Benskin was muttering to his junior). In an instant, Bosanquet had recovered himself: with steady precision he brought out his roll-call of final questions, and the doctor’s replies fell heavily into the hush.
“It has been suggested by some of your colleagues,” said Bosanquet, “that a sadistic killing of this kind couldn’t be performed by persons in a state of unimpaired responsibility. You know about that opinion?”
“Yes. I know it very well.”
“How do you regard it?”
“I respect it,” said Gough. “But I cannot accept it.”
“This kind of planned cruelty and killing is no proof of impaired responsibility, you say? I should like you to make that clear.”
“In my judgment, it is no proof at all.”
“People can perpetrate such a crime in a state of normal responsibility?”
“I believe so. I wish that I could believe otherwise.”